Deleporter is a little .NET library that teleports arbitrary delegates into an ASP.NET application in some other process (e.g., hosted in IIS) and runs them there. At the moment, it’s still pretty experimental, but I’ve found it useful so far.

Published Mar 9, 2010

Why would you want this? It’s mainly useful when you’re integration testing. Normally, integration tests can’t directly interact with your application’s code because it’s in a separate process (and possibly running on another machine). So, unlike unit tests, integration tests often struggle to test different configurations and have no option to use mocks.

Deleporter gets around that limitation. It lets you delve into a remote ASP.NET application’s internals without any special cooperation from the remote app (it just needs to include an extra IHttpModule in its config), and then you can do any of the following:

Cross-process mocking, by combining it with any mocking tool. For example, you could inject a temporary mock database or simulate the passing of time (e.g., if your integration tests want to specify what happens after 30 days or whatever)

Test different configurations, by writing to static properties in the remote ASP.NET appdomain or using the ConfigurationManager API to edit its entries.

Run teardown or cleanup logic such as flushing caches. For example, recently I needed to restore a SQL database to a known state after each test in the suite. The trouble was that ASP.NET connection pool was still holding open connections on the old database, causing connection errors. I resolved this easily by using Deleporter to issue a SqlConnection.ClearAllPools() command in the remote appdomain – the ASP.NET app under test didn’t need to know anything about it.

This library is built on regular .NET remoting. But unlike regular remoting, it run arbitrary delegates, not just methods specifically exposed by the remoting service. If the code for your delegate isn’t already loaded into the ASP.NET appdomain, Deleporter will serialize the code and send it across. This is really essential for being useful from an integration test suite, because the test code wouldn’t normally be in the real app.

Enough talk! Code now.

To use it, first download the binary or compile the source to get Deleporter.dll. Reference it from both your integration test project and the ASP.NET MVC/WebForms app you’re testing.

Next, to get your ASP.NET app to listen for commands, edit its Web.config file to reference this extra HTTP module:

Now, when you next start up your ASP.NET app, it will listen on TCP port 38473 – a randomly-chosen default – for commands from your integration test suite.

In your integration test code, you can now run arbitrary delegates in the remote ASP.NET app, sending both data and code into it, and optionally pulling data back. As a trivial example, you can pull back the server’s time local time:

You can use multi-statement lambdas, too, even if they capture locals from the containing method. Deleporter will send the captured locals into the remote app (as long as they’re serializable), and if the remote app edits them, it will pull back the new values and update your locals. In other words, anonymous methods and multi-statement lambdas work with captured local variables just as if all the code was running locally. Example:

[Test]publicvoid SendingAndUpdatingCapturedLocals(){
DateTime serverTime =default(DateTime);string fileToLocate ="~/web.config";string mappedPhysicalPath =null;
Deleporter.Run(()=>{// This code, which both reads and writes locals from the outer scope,// runs in the remote ASP.NET application
serverTime = DateTime.Now;
mappedPhysicalPath = HostingEnvironment.MapPath(fileToLocate);});
Assert.AreEqual(DateTime.Now.Year, serverTime.Year);
Assert.IsTrue(File.Exists(mappedPhysicalPath));// Of course, this will only be true if the ASP.NET app runs on the same machine as the integration test code}

More realistic applications

So far I’ve only shown very artificial examples designed to illustrate the syntax. To give you a more realistic idea of how you could apply it, I can offer two sample applications.

A very simple ASP.NET MVC app called WhatTimeIsIt whose sole behaviour varies according to the date. Like all good ASP.NET MVC applications, it uses the *Dependency Injection *pattern (in this example, with Ninject) to get the current date & time from an IDateProvider – the default implementation of which just returns DateTime.Now. <div style="margin-top:1em">
It has simple integration tests that use Deleporter and Moq to inject a mock IDateProvider across the process boundary while the app is running, and then verifies some behaviour that only happens during specific dates. It also demonstrates an easy way of tidying up after the tests run (restoring the original IDateProvider) automatically without cluttering the test code with teardown logic.
</div>

Scenario: Most recent entries are displayed first
Given we have the following existing entries
| Name | Comment | Posted date |
| Mr. A | I like A | 2008-10-01 09:20 |
| Mrs. B | I like B | 2010-03-05 02:15 |
| Dr. C | I like C | 2010-02-20 12:21 |
And I am on the guestbook page
Then the guestbook entries includes the following, in this order
| Name | Comment | Posted date |
| Mrs. B | I like B | 2010-03-05 02:15 |
| Dr. C | I like C | 2010-02-20 12:21 |
| Mr. A | I like A | 2008-10-01 09:20 |

Gotcha: What you must remember to avoid confusing problems

One behaviour might surprise you at first. It’s certainly caught me out plenty of times already. Each time you edit and recompile your integration test code, you must also recycle your ASP.NET appdomain (e.g., by resaving its Web.config file, or the nuclear option – running iisreset) otherwise the old code will still be loaded into it. That’s because, as far as I’m aware, there’s no way to unload an assembly from a .NET appdomain. Once your delegates have been transferred over, they’re staying there and can’t automatically be replaced by newer versions.

This isn’t a problem if you’re running an integration suite through your continuous integration (CI) system – the app code would be recompiled and hence reset between test suite runs. It’s only something to watch out for during local development. In the Deleporter.Test.Client project I’ve shown a crude but working way of automatically recycling the ASP.NET appdomain when the test suite starts running; you may be able to work out a better way of automating this if you need one.

Important security note

You should not enable DeleporterServerModule on a production web site. It’s only supposed to be used in dev and QA environments, because it’s literally an invitation to upload and execute arbitrary code.

To reduce the chance of a mistake, DeleporterServerModule will refuse to run if your web site was compiled in release mode – it will demand that you remove the IHttpModule from your Web.config file. Technically you should be OK if your firewall doesn’t accept inbound connections on port 38473 (or whatever port you configure it to listen on) anyway. Obviously, no warranties, you use it at your own risk, etc.

Test Driven Development (TDD) has been around for about a decade, and has been mainstream for at least five years now. During this time, TDD practitioners have been gradually changing and refining the methodology, the mindset, and the terminology in an effort to increase its usefulness and avoid some of the problems that newcomers often experience.